Building a Believable Chain of Events in Your Novel

believable chain of events
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Today’s post is an excerpt from Troubleshooting Your Novel by Steven James (@readstevenjames), from Writer’s Digest Books.


A game of billiards begins with the cue ball striking the racked balls, which then scatter across the pool table. After that, the players take turns trying to clear the table by pocketing another ball (either stripes or solids), all while keeping the cue ball out of the pockets.

We all understand that the game must start somehow. Normally that happens when one player hits that cue ball to break the triangle of racked balls. And from then on, every time a ball hits another, that contact results in an effect.

It’s the same with a story.

One opening event causes things to splinter apart for the main character in your novel. After that, there’s a chain of events that are all linked and caused by the ones that precede them.

A story moves from choice to consequences, from stimulus to response, from cause to effect. This happens on the macro-level, as the results of each scene set the stage for the next, and on the micro-level, as every action and every line of dialogue affects what comes next.

Cause: One ball strikes another.

Effect: That ball rolls across the table.

An event’s effect on a character should be immediately evident to readers. Even if the character is trying to ignore or repress a response, he’ll be impacted somehow. He must be. If he isn’t, readers will lose trust in the story’s believability.

Every action should be justified by the intersection of setting, context, pursuit, and characterization. They all need to make sense. They all need to fit.

If you have to explain why something just happened, you’re telling the story backward.

Fixing Causality Issues

Causality is closely related to believability and flow. If an event has no cause, readers will find the scene unbelievable. If there isn’t a strong enough stimulus to cause a certain event, it’ll seem contrived.

Neither unbelievable nor contrived events serve your readers or the story.

When you write a scene that doesn’t follow from cause to effect, you create a gap that requires readers to ask, “But why didn’t he …?” and requires you to explain what just happened.

And most of the time, that’s the opposite of what you want.

If a story moves from effect to cause, rather than from cause to effect, the flow will be disrupted. For example:

Reggie crossed through the kitchen and opened the cupboard. He was starving and wanted some canned ravioli.

Note how action occurs (Reggie crossed through the kitchen and opened the cupboard), and then an explanation is given for why it happened (he was starving and wanted some ravioli). This is backward. Rather than driving the story forward, the movement of the narrative stops as the author backtracks to explain. The sequence would be better cast like this:

Reggie was starving and wanted some canned ravioli. He crossed through the kitchen and opened the cupboard.

Here, action moves from cause to effect. There’s no need to explain afterward why Reggie opened the cupboard. The narrative flows naturally. Too often, novelists show an event and then explain why it happened. This disrupts the pace and disorients readers. Unless you have an overwhelming contextual reason to reverse the order, show the action and then the result—in that order.

Here’s another example of how not to do it:

Suzanne stepped into the shower. She needed to relax. As the water washed over her, she thought of the time she nearly drowned when she was nine. She let the water rinse across her skin. Finally, shuddering, she hastily toweled herself dry after turning off the faucet, and tried not to think about that traumatic day at the lake.

As it stands, most of the events in this paragraph happen out of order and sometimes inexplicably. (For instance, Suzanne remains in the shower instead of leaving it right away when the painful memory returns.)

Here’s the edited version:

Suzanne needed to relax, so she stepped into the shower. She let the water rinse over her, but it made her think of the time she nearly drowned when she was nine. Shuddering, she turned off the faucet and hastily toweled herself dry, trying not to think about that traumatic day at the lake.

Written in this way, no follow-up explanations are needed for why she does what she does. The actions make sense and move the story forward, and readers don’t have to ask why things are happening.

Study your story. Can readers see how one ball affects the movement of the others? If not, try reversing the order of events so they string together causally. Move the narrative forward, action to reaction, rather than action to explanation.

Does everything in a story have to be connected?

Unless your novel centers on the absurdity of life, every subsequent event (after the initiating one) should follow naturally and logically, otherwise the story won’t be cohesive.

  • Analyze every scene, as well as every paragraph, to weed out cause-and-effect problems. Pinpoint the connections between events. Does each action have an appropriate consequence? Does the emotional resonance of a scene fit in congruently from the actions within that scene? Do realizations or insights occur a er the event that caused them (as would naturally happen), or do I have things in the wrong order?
  • Troubleshooting Your NovelDoes this scene move from cause to effect? If not, why not? Can I tweak the story to show the natural flow of events rather than stop after they’ve happened to explain why they did?
  • Does context dictate that I reverse the order to effect to cause? Rendering the story this way will force readers to ask, “Why?” Do I want them to do so at this moment in the book? Would lack of clarity about the character’s intention help readers engage with the story at this point? If it won’t, how can I recast it?
  • What will I do to ensure that each ball rolls naturally away from the one that just hit it, both in action sequences and in dialogue?

If you enjoyed this post, I highly recommend Steven James’ book Troubleshooting Your Novel.

Steven James (@readstevenjames) autor Troubleshooting Your Novel writes, "An event’s effect on a character should be immediately evident to readers. Every action should be justified by the intersection of setting, context, pursuit, and characterization. They all need to make sense. They all need to fit. If you have to explain why something just happened, you’re telling the story backward."

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[…] Every action in your novel should be justified by character or context. If you have to explain why something happens, you’re telling the story backward.  […]

Rob Drex

A great article, really – as an audio book voice talent, the short audition piece we read to land the job may give hints of sketchy writing skills, but then when you get the job and have to read a story that has little or no continuity, making it contiguous and logical it becomes a nightmare! At the moment i am reading a book that is so incredibly painful regarding motivations, logis and flow that it is hard to read it with the needed feeling. Please make every author read this article and help book!

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[…] Building a Believable Chain of Events in Your Novel (Jane Friedman) A game of billiards begins with the cue ball striking the racked balls, which then scatter across the pool table. After that, the players take turns trying to clear the table by pocketing another ball (either stripes or solids), all while keeping the cue ball out of the pockets. […]

Michael W. Perry

Quote: “Here, action moves from cause to effect. There’s no need to explain afterward why Reggie opened the cupboard. The narrative flows naturally. Too often, novelists show an event and then explain why it happened. This disrupts the pace and disorients readers. Unless you have an overwhelming contextual reason to reverse the order, show the action and then the result—in that order.”

No, shifting between the two for variety is perfectly natural. Were we an observer, we’d often be thinking from effect to cause. We’d see Reggie open the cupboard and think, “Oh, he must be hungry.” Indeed, a good writer will often have events that his readers must figure out for themselves. George Bernard Shaw referred to that when it mentioned how difficult it was to write a play without having to give a formal explanation for everything. In a play, you don’t want Reggie’s opening that cupboard to be accompanied by a clumsy remark—to no one in particular—that he’s hungry.

I sometimes go even further. I bring up something that seems unbelievable, wait a few pages, and then surprise my readers by revealing why it actually makes sense. “Trust me,” I’m saying. “I know what I’m doing.”

Indeed, implausibility lies at the heart of many of the best murder mysteries, such as those involving a locked room. “This can’t have happened,” readers think. And they keep reading to find out why it can happen. Indeed the essence of most murder mysteries is revealing the result, the murder, but not revealing the cause. Solving is coming up with the chain of causes that explain the result.

–Michael W. Perry, co-author of Lily’s Ride

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[…] Steven James: Building a Believable Chain of Events in Your Novel  […]

Michael LaRocca

Steven has described my writing process perfectly. Great timing, too. I’m going to use the external pressure of NaNoWriMo to write one last novel before I go back into retirement.

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[…] Jane Friedman shares how to build a believable chain of events […]

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[…] Building a Believable Chain of Events in Your Novel is an excellent blog post on creating a logical chain of events. I thought I knew what I was doing until I read this. […]